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Intel leak in Finland

The Finnish Defence Forces' Defence Command has filed a criminal complaint regarding the disclosure of security intelligence data to Finland's most widely-read newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. The paper featured a story on a top secret intelligence research centre on Saturday

Rationalization by the editor.

Esa Mkinen, editor at Helsingin Sanomat, explained in a column late Saturday afternoon that the newspaper decided to make the data public in line with its primary duty to inform.
"The most important task of the media is to monitor and control the activities of the authorities. HS is responsible for supplying its readers with sufficient truthful information about what is happening in society," he wrote.
The editor makes the case that the residents of Finland, and even its MPs, know very little about the centre that was reported on in the article, and so the paper felt compelled to share the data it had obtained.
Mkinen wrote in his column that "if you want to say more than the official data, you have to rely on classified information".

The intelligence center’s surveillance activities were not confined to Russia, but that country was effectively the primary target of the operation, the paper notes. The center, it says, has been tasked with detecting Russian military movements in the St. Petersburg region based on electromagnetic radiation.
Special attention was drawn to Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline project, laid under the Baltic Sea and running from Vyborg to the coast city of Greifswald in north-east Germany.
At the end of the past decade, prior to the construction of the first line of the project that began in 2010, the Finnish intelligence services were seriously concerned about the potential use of the pipeline and its service towers for espionage, arguing that surveillance systems could be planted inside them. The concerns apparently faded with time, as the center stopped considering this possibility in 2006.

Professor and former Finnish ambassador, Alpo Rusi and the former party secretary of The Finnish Centre Party, author Jarmo Korhonen have published a new book titled “The Kremlin’s Footsteps – Finlandization and Background of the 2002 Spy Scandal” (Kremlin jalanjälet – suomettuminen ja vuoden 2002 vakoilukohun tausta (Docendo 2017)). The book is available only in Finnish, but it cover issues of high international relevance.

Alpo Rusi – who is currently a professor at Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania – became the focus of a Finnish spying scandal after leaving his post as an advisor to Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari (1994-2000). Alpo Rusi’s brother, Jukka, had been in contact with the East German STASI during the Cold War and documents concerning Jukka Rusi – in which Alpo Rusi was marked as a possible future contact – were used to label him as a spy.
The spying claims concerning Alpo Rusi were completely false, but the investigation process revealed many gaps in Finnish society and the challenges of Finnish “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” [the struggle to overcome the past] in general. What happened to Rusi and President Ahtisaari has become a prototype for Kremlin-style active measures. While the investigation itself was kafkaesque, the details contained inside the broader situation were created during the era of finlandization.